Team Eleven/Final Paper

Revision as of 23:43, 4 February 2013

Who We Are

We are Team Eleven or otherwise known as Team Stevie the Cat. Our inspiration is drawn from Stevie the Cat, a feline so fierce and admirable that he came third in EC's presidential election. He never received a car for his 16th birthday so we decided to build him a robot as reparation; thus the Stevie Wagon came into being.

Members

The acolytes of Stevie include Charles Franklin, Valentina Chamorro, and Yanni Coroneos.

• Charles is the Junior member of the team and embedded programmer.
• Valentina is one of two frosh on the team and the resident Mech E. Also, it was discovered during the course of Maslab that she may or may not have narcolepsy.
• Yanni is the other frosh. He worked on both the programming and mechanical side of things.

Together, the three of us devoted our IAP's to our ruthless leader Stevie in hopes that we may bring him glory and mobility.

Overall Strategy

Game Objective

The setup of this year’s Maslab competition was as follows: Robots are placed into a field with an assigned color of balls. Points can be earned by collecting the balls, or scoring them in one of several locations. Scoring points in the pyramid receives the most points (the higher up the greater the points earned); meanwhile, depositing balls over one of the yellow walls receives less points. The competition requires robots to navigate the field completely autonomously using a camera and sensors.

Our Objective

We set out to maintain a simple as possible strategy. We figured that when one gets bogged down trying to accomplish “everything,” then more things are likely to go wrong. Therefore, our strategy consisted of collecting as many balls as possible and dumping them over the yellow scoring wall during the last ten seconds. The way we saw it, the pyramid was a tease and if our robot was predisposed to go for the yellow wall, then we could effectively negate any “scored” points made by the other team by returning their balls to their side of the field. This required a strong codebase and dependable mechanical design. We used the checkoffs as a guide for progressing our design and software. Most of our code was completed prior to the construction of the actual robot as a result of the checkoffs. Though perhaps a more in tandem approach might have been more effective, this allowed us to dedicate solid working hours to construction. Due to time constraints and other commitments, however, by the end our strategy only consisted of collecting balls which ended up being a solid approach for racking up points. The rest would be left up to actual execution of the program and physical product during testing and the competition.

Mechanical Design and Sensors

Our team began sketching ideas for the design over winter break in an attempt to get ahead of the competition. Our designs, though rather different from our final product, centered around the same main idea: a square base to maximize area and a simple ball collection mechanism.

Design Components

• Rubber Band Roller: We decided that the best way to bring in the balls would be a roller that would extend along the majority of the front edge to optimize capture ability. We laser cut pieces of acrylic that would be held together on an axel using collars we machined and the tension provided by the rubber bands. • Collection Bin: The bin was water jetted our of